Custom and Costume

19Etnográfica, Vol. IX (1), 2005, pp. 19-48

The research agenda that we share in this volume invites us to focus onobjectified folk culture and analyze it as something instrumental, somethingthat is deployed within the politics of identity construction. This is undou-btedly a pertinent approach to folk culture. But I think it is also sympto-matic of a certain discomfort with the concept of culture (to say nothing ofthe notion of folk) that has been affecting anthropologists for the last twodecades.

Anthropology, especially North American anthropology, has for a longtime now defined itself as the study of culture. In the 1980s, however, anthro-pologists began to realize that just about everybody was using that word. AsRoger Just noticed ten years ago “all cultures now have a ‘culture’” and thiscan be “a little disconcerting” for us anthropologists, who may feel that cul-tures talking about “culture” “are nevertheless not always talking about quitethe same things as ourselves” (1995: 286). As always, whenever a concepthops from academia into the streets, many academics begin to get worried.People down in the streets are talking too much about culture and are takingit all too literally – they are essentialising culture. Now, literality or essential-ism is one of the things academics are the most anxious about, to the extentthat some of them have gotten into that peculiar habit of hooking their indexand middle fingers in the air whenever they say words that are not to betaken literally or as meaning what they ordinarily mean.

Sometimes I feel that many of us have given up constructing our ownrepresentations of other cultures and started deconstructing other people’srepresentations of their own cultures, not only because they actually do con-struct those representations of themselves, but also as a means to bypass someuneasiness that the traditional anthropological use of the word culture has

This article focuses on the genealogy andinstrumentality of a particular item of “folkculture”: Our Lady of the Minho. It is an image ofMary made in the late 1950s in which theiconographic features of the Virgin merged withthose of the lavradeira, the paramount icon of theAlto Minho region. I attempt to frame the historyof this image and its respective cult within theinterplay of (1) a local religious folk culture, (2) aMinhoto regionalist movement particularly activefrom the 1920s onwards, and (3) ecclesiasticcultural and political trends at international,national, diocesan and parish levels. By means ofthis framing, I try to understand not only howthe fusion of an image of the Virgin with thelavradeira became possible, but also how it hasbeen open to different kinds of appropriation andsignificance.

CUSTOM AND COSTUMEAT A LATE 1950s MARIANSHRINE IN NORTHWEST

PORTUGAL

João Vasconcelos

João Vasconcelos

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been causing us. We are still talking about “culture,” but we are no longer sonaïve as to think that the thing inside the inverted commas exists.

In this article,1 I will deal with the politics of “folk culture” in a tinycorner of the Lusophone world. I will concentrate very specifically on thegenealogy and instrumentality of a particular cultural item: Our Lady of theMinho, an object made by the merging of an image of the Virgin Mary withthe folkloric symbol of the lavradeira. Lavradeira is the feminine form oflavrador and both names stem from the same Latin root as the English wordslabor and laborer. Still, the most accurate translation for lavradeira would befarmwife. Until two or three decades ago, lavradores and lavradeiras were themen and women who belonged to what we might call the well-off peasantryof northern Portugal. They were landowners of small to medium-sized pro-perties, which they toiled ideally on a self-sufficiency basis. Women were incharge of the household, raised their offspring and did most of the daily farmwork. Men used to migrate seasonally or for longer periods in order to getsome extra income in cash. What concerns us here, though, is that for almosta century the lavradeira has been the personification of the provincial identityof the Alto Minho region. By embodying the lavradeira’s iconography, OurLady of the Minho can also be seen, partly at least, as an instance of culturalobjectification.

However, in order to comprehend the genesis of this symbol and thepolitics of its respective cult history, I will not eschew the old anthropologi-cal concept of culture without inverted commas. In fact, the broad argumentthat I wish to illustrate here is that one cannot analytically detach objectifiedcultural items from the living cultures within which they are displayed. Forit is only within these cultures in motion, and also through their mutual dis-crepancies, that those items can have any significance and thus be of anypolitical use. In the case under study, I will pay special attention to what wecould schematically call (a) a religious folk culture, (b) an ecclesiastic religiousculture, and (c) a regionalist cultural movement that is, in our case, largelysubsidiary of the nationalist trend that spread throughout Europe from thenineteenth century onwards. By means of an historical and ethnographicenquiry, I will try to show how the cult of Our Lady of the Minho has beenmolded by the interplay of these cultural settings.

Legendary beginnings

The cult of Our Lady of the Minho began in the mid-1950s in the heart of theAlto Minho, the northwest region of Portugal whose territory overlaps the

1 Translation from the Portuguese by Carole Garton revised by the author.

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Viana do Castelo district (which I will henceforth also refer to simply asViana, following local usage). The shrine of Our Lady of the Minho is locatedin Chã Grande, a mountain plain some 800 meters above sea level on the topof Serra de Arga. There are at present two ways to reach Chã Grande by car.One can get there from the northwest on a dirt track road that starts near theSão João de Arga chapel. However, the easier and more usual route is theforest road that goes from São Lourenço da Montaria, a parish halfway up themountain slope, and winds its way eastward along the sierra for eight kilo-meters. The air grows thinner as we go up and the trees give way to clustersof rocks and boulders.

I dreamed or then someone told meThat one dayIn São Lourenço da MontariaA frog asked God to be as big as an oxAnd the frog wasIt was God who explodedLeaving rocks and more rocks spread out on the hillsLeaving that quiet atmosphere of sensitive ruinsLeaving an overwhelming desire to abandon our fingers on the edges of thecraggy hillsLeaving our breath light, relieved from the weight of above.

This is the beginning of “Proto-poema da Serra d’Arga” by the Surrealist poetAntónio Pedro (1948). And it is what the Serra de Arga heights look like:granite boulders covered with pale green and whitish lichens jutting out eve-rywhere; heather, gorse and broom shrubs and tufts of golden grass growingin between them. The whole sky is spread out above and on clear days onecan see almost the whole region below: to the west, the Atlantic coast fromViana all the way up to Caminha; to the east, far away at a great distance, themisty shape of the Serra do Gerês.

To narrate the story of the cult of Our Lady of the Minho I will rely ona number of fieldnotes, recorded interviews and literature that I collected inthe summers of 1992 and 1996 during two periods of fieldwork in Serra deArga.2 I first heard of it in 1992 on the occasion of my first stay in Serra de

2 In the summer of 1992, I spent two months in Arga de Baixo with my wife, Catarina Alves Costa. We lived in the par-ish house, which had been unoccupied since the last live-in priest abandoned the job to go after a girl from aneighbouring parish he had fallen in love with. During our stay, I collected material about many festivities in the areafor an inventory of Portuguese pilgrimages that I was then preparing (Vasconcelos 1996 and 1998a). Between July andSeptember 1996 I spent some more weeks in the Serra de Arga, doing research on folklorism and the patrimonializationof peasant culture for my master’s thesis (Vasconcelos 1998b). Parts of these previous works are rephrased in thisarticle. It is pretty old material, and I wouldn’t have returned to it if it hadn’t been for João Leal’s kind invitation to par-ticipate in the conference on “The Politics of Folk Culture” (Lisbon, 12-13 March 2004). I thank him very much for it andhope to make up for the age of my notes and observations by trying out a new approach. I am also indebted to AndreaKlimt, whose criticism and editorial comments have helped me to improve considerably the first manuscript.

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Arga. The annual pilgrimage to the Chã Grande shrine had taken place onJuly 2nd, just a few days prior to my arrival, but it was still the topic of con-versation in the mountain hamlets. I knew nothing about the cult, so I actedlike an ethnographer and began to question people about its origins. ThoseI spoke with fulfilled their role as ethnographer’s informants, and conversa-tion after conversation they all told me more or less the same story.

Some said that the chapel of Our Lady of the Minho had existed for along, long time. Others said that it only dated back to their time. I noticed thattheir statements didn’t depend on their age and I thought this strange. Somein their fifties said that Our Lady of the Minho had started in their time whilesome older people said they had no idea as to its origin. People’s memoriesare definitely not the best source for establishing objective facts and accuratechronologies. On the other hand, they are an extraordinary mine of informa-tion for other things – for instance cultural mnemonics, such as folk modelsof story-telling.

Regardless of the antiquity attributed to the cult, everyone agreed asto how it appeared. The image of Our Lady of the Minho, so I was told, wasdiscovered by some women who were tending their goats and sheep in ChãGrande. The day grew hot and the women sat in the shade to rest when theynoticed a light shining in the distance. They went to see what it was andfound an image of the Virgin half hidden in a hole. The villagers then had asmall chapel built there. From then on, there have been annual celebrationsand the people from the neighborhoods started developing a devotion to OurLady of the Minho.

The primitive chapel is still there. It is primitive in both senses ofthe word, because it is the older temple and also because it is such a simpleconstruction: a small shelter made entirely of stone nestling between rocks.Its front opens in an arched entry protected by an iron gate through whichone can see an altar with the image of Our Lady of the Minho flankedby small jars with flowers (see Fig. 1). This is the true image, as everyonesays to distinguish it from the two images made later that are to be foundin the more recently built chapel standing a hundred meters away. I wastold that the true image was once polychrome, but time and inclementweather had worn the color away and covered the stone image of Our Ladyin moss.

Despite the green patina, the Virgin’s face and form are still discer-nible. She looks straight ahead, her right arm is raised and her hand poisedto bless, while her left arm is bent on her lap and clasps two corn-ears. A longmantle falls from her head down to her feet. Under the mantle, she is wea-ring a white linen blouse, woolen waistcoat, skirt and apron, white socks andopen-back shoes, the traditional festive attire of lavradeiras. This costume,known as the lavradeira’s, Viana (vianesa) or regional costume, has been the

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symbol of the Alto Minho region for over eighty years. No other apparelcould be more appropriate for that Virgin Mary.

As an ethnographer, I was sufficiently familiar with the historical andanthropological literature on “folk” or “local” Catholicism. So I knew that thestory of an image of the Virgin found in a hole on the top of a sierra by someshepherdesses drawn there by a shining light was a word for word replica-tion of a recurring legendary model that has been around in Christian Europesince the ninth century (cf. Christian 1981a and 1981b, Velasco Maillo 1989,Turner & Turner 1978: 41-45). The tradition of inventio (finding, discovery) ofimages of the Virgin Mary has been handed down from the older traditionof the inventio of saints’ relics, and has for centuries been a folk custom – apart of folk culture.

Fig. 1 – The true image of Our Lady of the Minho coveredin moss and sheltered in her little stone chapel.

(Photo by J. Vasconcelos, 1996).

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However, I was aware that the cult to Our Lady of the Minho was rela-tively recent, and, naïve ethnographer that I was, I also thought that if sucha tale was told of a shrine only a few decades old, then perhaps there couldbe an element of truth to it. So, I did everything I could to find who thosesupposed shepherdesses were. I traveled around the sierra hamlets in searchof information about them. I wanted to know how many they were, whattheir names were, how old they were and where they lived. But the only thingthat people sometimes told me was that the shepherdesses were from theparish of São Pedro dos Arcos. Whenever I tried to find out more about them,they seemed to vanish like frightened ghosts. In the end, I came to the con-clusion that there had never been any shepherdesses at all.

More matter-of-fact beginnings

Then someone advised me to seek out Dona Conceição Cerqueira. She livedin Estorãos and had for a long time been the housekeeper of Father JoséAugusto Alves, the old priest of that parish who had died a few years before.She could give me the information that I wanted about the shrine’s origin.And so this is what I did.

Dona Conceição welcomed me into her house and we both sat downby the table in the room. There was a framed photograph of the late prieston a bookshelf. Seeing me look at it, Dona Conceição opened a drawer andtook out more photographs and a medal she kept in a case. That medal, sheexplained as I examined it, had been given to Father Alves in 1966 by Presi-dent of the Republic Américo Thomaz. It was an award of agricultural meritthat he had received for his work in persuading farmers of Estorãos and otherfour parishes as to the advantages of the re-allotment of land, a moderniz-ing policy actively promoted by the Junta de Colonização Interna (a sort ofHome Colonization Board). Dona Conceição put the medal back into its caseand sighed. She had been Father Alves’ only family for over thirty years.

José Augusto Alves was born in 1906 in a village near Melgaço, innortheastern Alto Minho. He was appointed Estorãos parish priest in 1946and remained there until his death in 1988. Estorãos’ major hamlet lies at thefoot of Serra de Arga, but the parish territory includes the land up to theheights of Chã Grande. One of Father Alves’ favorite distractions was to walkto the top of the sierra and enjoy the fresh air and views. In about 1950, hedecided to Christianize that wild spot and had a granite cross put up there.In 1954, to celebrate the centennial of the dogmatic definition of the Imma-culate Conception of Mary, Father Alves and his fellow priest in the neigh-boring São Pedro dos Arcos had a statue of Our Lady of the Conceptionerected in Chã Grande. Shortly afterwards, Father Alves decided to have a

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chapel built next to the cross – the primitive little granite chapel that is stillthere to this day. He himself supervised the work, which was carried out byAntónio Silvães, a stonemason from Estorãos.

Erecting shrines on top of mountains is a recurring tradition in manyreligious contexts, as shown in the work of the historian of religions MirceaEliade (e.g. n.d.: 49-53). But perhaps this phenomenon lends itself more to astructuralist or systemic reading than to the nominalist symbolic interpreta-tion that Eliade’s theory of archetypes proposes. While in northwest Portu-gal the mountains and hills are the most commonly chosen locations for holysites, it also happens that in the southern regions of Beira Baixa and theAlentejo, the most important pilgrimage shrines are usually found on theplains. This seems to indicate that the issue is not the orography in and ofitself, but rather the value it acquires in the context of a socialized landscape.In the northwest, human settlements spread mainly along the fertile low-lands, whereas in the south, they are typically concentrated around ancientfortified towns located on hilltops. The mountaintops in the northwest andthe vast plains in the south have thus a homologous positional value. In bothareas, the chosen sites for the foundation of sacred places are significantlyin no man’s land – “institutional deserts,” as Jacques Le Goff (1988) ter-med them.

In order to choose an invocation and an iconography for the image ofthe Virgin he intended to place in the chapel, Father Alves sought out Mon-signor Moreira das Neves, at that time one of the leading figures of the Por-tuguese Catholic Church, and asked his advice. In the words of Moreira dasNeves, “it seemed to us that the most fitting would be Our Lady of theMinho, dressed in the Viana fashion. [...] The difficulty only lay in the artistensuring that the sculpture depicted Our Lady and not just a young womanfrom the Minho, as those in folkloric parades and romarias of the northernprovince.”3 To make sure that the balanced syncretism he had in mind wasachieved, Monsignor Moreira das Neves entrusted the sculptor AntónioDuarte with the clay model of the work.

António Duarte was a well-educated sculptor trained at the LisbonFine Arts School, who had received many state and church commissions. Theartist based the Virgin’s dress on an old lavradeira’s costume on display in theLeite de Vasconcelos Ethnologic Museum in Lisbon. Monsignor Moreira dasNeves was enchanted with the result:

the still damp clay glowed with the spirituality of the Virgin of Nazareth, herserene maternal face, her hand raised in a blessing gesture and her complete

3 This and the next quotation were taken from “Como surgiu a invocação de Nossa Senhora do Minho,” a short articlewritten by Monsignor Moreira das Neves in the January 21st 1981 edition of the regional newspaper Diário do Minho.

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Minhota costume. The corn-ear is a very appropriate attribute as it is theregion’s main produce as well as a meaningful symbol in well-known clas-sic instances... The kernels that make up the corn-ear could well be an allu-sion to the inner unity that can be seen in the life of the Virgin as in that ofthe Church.

The first image of Our Lady of the Minho (the true image) was sculpted instone by an image-maker from the neighboring parish of Arcozelo and basedon António Duarte’s model.4 In 1958, the image was put in the chapel andthe first annual festivity was held. The official name of the Virgin of the Serrade Arga became Nossa Senhora da Conceição do Minho (Our Lady of the Con-ception of the Minho). Again a thoughtful balance between referents wasreached. In order to fuse a Marian archetype with the regional symbol of theMinho, a great deal of care was taken in measuring the iconographic ingre-dients into the right quantities so that they wouldn’t blur into each other. Thechoice of a name to give this hybrid was likewise carefully thought out. Aninvocation that conveyed a strong folkloric and regional flavor (Our Lady ofthe Minho) was tempered with a more churchlike and national one (Our Ladyof the Conception). On the one hand, Our Lady of the Conception has beenthe patron saint of Portugal since King João IV has proclaimed her so in themid-seventeenth century. Any regionalist excess that might be read in theinvocation of the Minho was thus framed within a broader nationalist refer-ent. On the other hand, Our Lady of the Conception is also an invocationintimately associated with the ecclesiastic movement for the resurgence ofMarian devotion that spread throughout Portugal and the whole of CatholicEurope in the mid-nineteenth century.

The modern tradition of Marian pilgrimage

The first clear sign of this Marian revival was the intensification of appari-tions that were supported or at least not opposed by the Roman CatholicChurch. The first took place in La Salette (1846) and Lourdes (1858), and bothhad substantial apocalyptic contents. The Virgin Mary came down to Earthto reproach her children and remind them of the need to observe religiousrules (attending Mass regularly, daily prayer, fasting at Lent), to repent andperform penitence for the salvation of sinners. In the La Salette apparition,which was more eschatological than that of Lourdes, Our Lady even threa-tened that if the people of the region failed to amend their sinful ways, shewould not be able to hold the heavy hand of God away from them much

4 Information supplied by Conceição Cerqueira, which I was unable to confirm with other sources.

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longer. In this and other messages typical of this renewed Marian piety, therebegan to take shape a Virgin with certain salient attributes: mother-refuge ofher children struck by the adversity of the world, intercessor before a righ-teous God, defender and bastion of the Church. These were not new attri-butes, but became paramount at that time in the context of the new Marianpiety and the Church’s discourse.

In 1854, between the La Salette and Lourdes apparitions, Pope Pius IXestablished the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. RomanCatholicism at that time felt threatened by secularism, rationalism, scientismand the loss of the Papal States. Pius IX forged ahead out of this siege stress-ing the extra-worldly and non-rational foundations of the Roman Church byimposing a novel dogma that, although rooted in old theological and folktraditions, openly scorned modern common sense. In 1858 the Virginappeared in Lourdes and presented herself to the clairvoyant BernardetteSoubirous as the “Immaculate Conception.” In 1870, Pius IX decreed anotherdogma, that of papal infallibility, and the words of the Virgin at Lourdes werethen interpreted by the ultramontane clergy as proof both of the dogma thathad been established in 1854 and of the pope’s new faculty. From then on,ultramontanism (that is to say, the doctrine that upholds Roman centralismin the Catholic Church and the Pope’s infallibility) and Marianism wereclosely linked in ecclesiastic culture.

This modern Marian fervor is referred to in ecclesiastical circles as theAge of Mary. According to Father Fernando Leite (1991), the Age of Mary beginswith the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception. Henceforth,

papal teaching grows much more frequent, caring and theological in incul-cating devotion to the Mother of God. New liturgical celebrations emerge andold ones are revived, many religious institutions place themselves under theprotection of Mary, Mariological congresses and societies study her preroga-tives, popular piety is revitalized with new devotions, pilgrimages and fes-tivities, apparitions of the Mother proliferate, some explicitly approved andothers permitted by the ecclesiastic authorities (Leite 1991: 10).

These new Marian devotions and pilgrimages were genuine invented tradi-tions, in the way Eric Hobsbawm defined them as being

a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules andof a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values andnorms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity withthe past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuitywith a suitable historical past (1983: 1).

Although inventing traditions is probably a process to be found at all timesand places, Hobsbawm adds, “we should expect it to occur more frequently

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when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social pat-terns for which ‘old’ traditions had been designed” (1983: 4). This was pre-cisely what was happening within Roman Catholicism in the mid-nineteenthcentury. The ecclesiastic renewal of Marian devotion and the invention ofmodern Marian pilgrimages came as a result of the position in which theCatholic Church found itself having to face “new political and ideologicalchallenges and major changes in the composition of the faithful (such as thenotable feminization of both lay piety and of clerical personnel)” (Hobsbawm1983: 5).5

In Portugal, the first center of the new Marian devotion was the shrineof Our Lady of Sameiro, which is still today the second most popular pilgrim-age site after Fátima. Considering that Pope John Paul II’s pontificate wasmarked by a further ecclesiastic revival of the Marian cult, it is no surprisethat these were the two shrines that he visited when he first came to Portu-gal in 1982. The Sameiro shrine dates back to the 1860s and is located at thetop of a hill above Braga, a town often referred to as the “city of archbishops.”A local priest, Father Martinho Pereira da Silva, was the main promoter of theOur Lady of Sameiro cult. According to one of his biographers, he “was vis-cerally devoted to the immortal Pius IX” (Luís da Silva Ramos, cit. in Memo-rias… 1882: 81).6 After the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Con-ception, Father Martinho had the idea of putting up a commemorative monu-ment on the top of Mount Sameiro. To this end, he got together a committeecomposed of local members of the aristocracy and clergy. The monument, amarble sculpture of the Immaculate Mary three meters in height on a granitepedestal, was unveiled in 1869. At the opening ceremony presided over bythe archbishop of Braga, the following hymn was sung:

Over there, on those heightsThey will read in coming agesProtest against the outrageousAnd false doctrines of evil;And from faraway landsPeople will come on pilgrimageTo render homage to herGathered around her pedestal.

Pilgrimages to Our Lady of Sameiro began in 1871. They take the form ofwell-ordered processions and are still hugely attended today. These proces-sions are organized by Catholic associations in Braga, and bring together

5 For more on “post-industrial Marian pilgrimage,” cf. Turner & Turner (1978: 203-230).6 On the work and life of Martinho Pereira da Silva, cf. also Leite (1964) and Ramos (1878).

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many thousands of people who walk the five kilometers from the city cathe-dral to the shrine as they intone prayers and hymns. For the brotherhood whoran the cult in the late nineteenth century, the pilgrimages to Sameiro were“a public testimonial of the religious feelings of a people who still glorify thehonorable title of Roman Catholic,” and “a solemn rejection of the rampantimpiety that thinks it can do away with the everlasting guiding light of Faithin humanity’s heart” (Memorias... 1882: 69). This new form of public cultquickly spread from Sameiro to other shrines, especially in the north, thatwere either brand new or duly transformed by the clergy.7 In the early twen-tieth century, the writer and journalist Alberto Pimentel noticed this pheno-menon and observed that “pilgrimages are a form of cult that has beenmodernly adopted in Portugal” (1905: 138). A genuine invented tradition.

Re-Christianizing Portuguese romarias

This century-old ecclesiastic tradition clearly influenced Father Alves in 1954when he had the monument to the Immaculate Conception built on the topof Serra de Arga. But there was also a more recent ecclesiastic trend at play.It was the campaign for the re-Christianization of romarias, a crusade thatwas pursued between the 1930s and the 1950s, again with special fervor andsuccess in the dioceses of northern Portugal. Although etymologically theword means a pilgrimage to Rome, romaria is the name commonly given topopular festivals held at country chapels or shrines on major pilgrimage days,usually organized by confraternities (confrarias) or brotherhoods (irmandades),or more unofficial festival committees (comissões de festas) that consist mostlyof lay people but are presided over by local priests. These festivals typicallyinclude the payment of promises, Masses, processions and a number ofactivities such as open-air markets, fun fairs, auction sales, music playing,singing and dancing, picnics, barbecues, and drinking.8

In the early 1930s, the Portuguese Roman Catholic Church managedto consolidate anew its hegemony that had been badly shaken by the fiercelyanticlerical First Republic (1910-1926). Under the dictatorship of Salazar, theChurch was now in a position to embark on a number of policies in coalitionwith the means and interests of the New State (Estado Novo). One of these jointpolicies was the campaign for the re-Christianization of romarias. This was apriestly, political and often policed movement aimed at ridding those festivi-ties of what most upset the prevailing ecclesiastic sensibility as well as bour-

7 On the history of some other modern Marian pilgrimages in Portugal, cf. Pimentel (1905: 138-169) and Vasconcelos(1996: 61-65, 68-73, 84; 1998a: 294-295, 305-316).8 The best account of Portuguese romarias in English can be found in Sanchis (1983b).

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geois order and morality. The campaign was mostly directed against thearraiais, the so-called profane side of the romarias. It is noteworthy that thisselective and sometimes violent repression of certain elements of folk culturethat were seen as backward, inappropriate or transgressive, went togetherwith an equally selective folklorization and monumentalization of other pea-sant folkways – and at many romarias both processes occurred simultaneously.The celebration of depurated folk customs and costumes was indeed one ofthe main ingredients of the nationalist ideology under Salazar’s regime.9

The campaign for the re-Christianization of romarias has been compre-hensively described and analyzed by Pierre Sanchis (1983a). I will justoffer here two short but vivid illustrations of its practical implementation. Thefirst concerns the romaria of Our Lady Aparecida at Balugães, near Barcelos.Father Bartolomeu Ribeiro, the parish priest, described how he looked uponthe festival in the early 1930s:

late nights with fireworks, bands playing music, a large showy fair sprawledout on the grounds around Our Lady’s chapel, which was filled with barrelsof wine, stalls selling sweets, lupin seeds and refreshments, a bit of dancinghere and there, groups of lads and young girls singing to the sound of har-monicas, timbrels and triangles – a very nice romaria, or so the Christiancarousers called it (1975: 44).

For Father Bartolomeu, the churchyard of Our Lady Aparecida had becomethe “devil’s yard” (1975: 44). So he set in motion “the transformation of theromaria of Balugães into a pilgrimage of devout followers of Our LadyAparecida” (1975: 61; author’s italics). His aim was clear: “we must get ridof these light-hearted romeiros and drive out the pagan believers to give placeto devout Christian pilgrims. This cleansing process requires persistentthough silent, peaceful and gentle action” (1975: 45).

Meanwhile, Father António Molho de Faria was starting up the verysame kind of campaign at the romaria of São Bento da Porta Aberta in themountains of Gerês. He found that “the people just abandon themselves toall kinds of profane behavior, lascivious dancing or singing only when thecollective acts are finished, when there is no concert or firework display, etc.”(1985: 130). Therefore, the way to prevent people from falling into lascivious-ness was to provide an exhaustive and varied program with very few andshort breaks. It was to consist of Masses, processions, concerts, prayers,exhibition of folkloric groups and brass bands and so on. The people wouldno longer be the stage performers but spectators. In a passage that deserves

9 There is an extensive body of anthropological, historical and sociological literature on the confluence of national-ism and folklorism under the New State. See, for instance, Brito (1982), Alves (1997), Melo (2001), and many contri-butions to the collective volume edited by Castelo-Branco & Branco (2003).

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to be fully quoted, Father Molho de Faria explains the importance of mod-ern technological equipment in the re-Christianization of romarias:

It would all have been impossible if it hadn’t been for the loudspeakers. It wasthanks to powerful microphones cleverly installed and each one devoted onlyto serve the holy cause, [...] that we managed to stay in contact with thosecrowds. We had them in the palms of our hands. They immediately and joy-fully obeyed. By playing records of fit and proper music and songs, thecrowds were also entertained. But it was in transmitting the religious servicesthat the loudspeakers were really irreplaceable. And there was also anothergreat advantage: even if they failed to get everybody’s attention, they madeenough noise to quench any desire for certain indecent or undesirable sortsof entertainment. Certain singing and dancing lost their appeal when con-trasted with the loudspeakers. As a rule, the strongest always won (1985: 137).

When Father Alves placed the image of Our Lady of the Minho in the chapelat the top of the Serra de Arga, he wanted to make it a shrine for pilgrims andnot a place for romarias. More than this, and according to some priests I spoketo, one of the reasons why Father Alves invented the new cult was to start apilgrimage that would be immediately distinguishable from one of the mostpopular folk romarias celebrated in the surrounding neighborhood: the romariaof São João de Arga.10 This romaria was primarily famous (and still is) for thearraial that starting in the afternoon of August 28th, goes on all night untildawn of the following day (the Feast of the Beheading of St John the Baptist).It’s held near a chapel lost in the middle of the sierra on an unpaved yardwith some old cork trees, on a sort of promontory overlooking a valley. At theend of the 1950s, due to the isolation of the small mountain parish thatorganized this festivity and the fact that the local priests seemed to showlittle concern for it, the romaria of São João had hardly been affected by there-Christianization crusade.11 The romaria was really the nocturnal arraial. Theoverwhelming importance of the night-time celebrations was well capturedin the early 1970s by the ethnologist Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira:

As night falls, the revelry quickly gets going: in growing disorder, concertinasstart to play everywhere, groups gather around them and dancing beginsagain, alternating today with the loudspeakers or then simultaneously withtheir booming noise. There’s a great deal of coming and going: people have

10 I owe a great deal of what I know about the history of the Our Lady of the Minho cult to the information I waskindly given by some priests in 1992 and 1996. I would especially like to thank the then Estorãos parish priest,Father Artur Coutinho and Monsignor Sebastião Pires Ferreira, the Vicar General of the Viana diocese.11 Arga de São João, commonly known as Santo Aginha, is the mountain parish to which the festival committee thatorganises the romaria belongs. It was only in the 1960s that this parish, along with those of Arga de Baixo and Argade Cima, could be reached by road.

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a coffee, a drink, a snack or sweet on sale there; they pile up on verandas andsteps of the “lodgings” round the chapel to watch the revelry. Fireworks gooff in the middle of the night; but singing and dancing immediately start upagain ceaselessly in the spaces left free by those who fall asleep on theground, while others make their prayers and fulfill their promises in silenceinside or around the chapel – until dawn (1984: 236).12

Now this was exactly what Father Alves did not want for Our Lady of theMinho. The new chapel was to be the center of a pious pilgrimage. Festivi-ties would be limited to religious ceremonies and the payment of promisesby the faithful in the morning, followed by picnics in the countryside andthen everyone was to go back home. Fair people were to be discouraged fromgathering in large numbers and arraial festivities were definitely out. Therewere certainly never to be any nocturnal festivities. Maybe this new pilgri-mage model might even have a pedagogic effect on the festive habits of thepeople in the area.

Besides this, Father Alves also dreamed of making Our Lady of theMinho the modern Marian sanctuary that was lacking in the Ponte de Limaborough (concelho) to which the Estorãos parish belongs. One man alone couldnever accomplish a project of this scale. In effect, Father Alves was able to relynot only on the help of Monsignor Moreira das Neves, the sculptor AntónioDuarte, the Estorãos stonemason who built the first chapel and the Arcozeloimage-maker who sculpted the first statue. He also set up and presided overa confraternity to administer the cult and got together a fine group of sup-porters in the Ponte de Lima borough. One of them was his fellow priest atthe neighboring parish of São Pedro dos Arcos, Father Armando MartinsPereira – although, as we shall see, they later had a falling out. Two otherpriests who became quite involved in promoting the new cult were CanonCorreia, parish priest of Ponte de Lima, and Father Benjamim Salgado, whowrote the Our Lady of the Minho hymn that is still sung at the annual pil-grimages. On the material level, the financial support given by an importantEstorãos landowner and a wealthy shopkeeper from Moreira do Lima wascrucial.

Pilgrimages to Our Lady of the Minho were held every year in Julyafter the chapel was built. In June 1960, the regional newspaper O Lima an-nounced the approach of “another pilgrimage to the top of the Serra d’Arga

12 The description the ethnologist Veiga de Oliveira makes of the São João de Arga arraial contrasts remarkably withFather Molho de Faria’s description of the one at São Bento da Porta Aberta. Whereas the former doesn’t hide hisfascination with the confusion that reigns over the arraial and his discomfort with the “loud noise coming from louds-peakers,” the latter deplores the “popular and lascivious dancing and singing” and praises the magnificent resultsof amplifying the sound. For more on loudspeakers at the romaria of São João de Arga, cf. Vasconcelos (1997). BesidesOliveira (1984), also Coutinho (1997: 15-22), Garrido (1984) and Vasconcelos (1998a: 332-339) give lengthy descriptionsof the festivity in different epochs. For an abjectionist sketch of the romaria in the 1940s, cf. Pedro (1948).

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where there will be an open air sung Mass, addresses, sung Rosary, blessingof the Holy Sacrament and a low Mass.” The writer of the article hopedthat “thanks to the Reverend Father José Augusto Alves, his zeal and persis-tence [...], the Serra de Arga Cenacle will in future become another livingshrine in permanent journey to the Patroness of Portugal.” This hope, howe-ver, was never fulfilled. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the annual festivi-ties of Our Lady of the Minho did become part of the festive customs of thepeople who lived in the area of Serra de Arga, but never achieved the muni-cipal scale to which its promoters had aspired.

At the end of the 1970s, Father José Augusto Alves and FatherArmando Martins Pereira quarreled. I haven’t succeeded in finding out thefull extent of what happened. According to the little information I managedto gather, Father Pereira allegedly started claiming that the chapel had beenbuilt on São Pedro dos Arcos territory, and thus proceeds coming from thecult belonged to its parish committee (comissão fabriqueira). Father Alves andother members that headed his confraternity refused to accept this and hence-forth feelings of animosity arose between the estranged Estorãos and Arcospriests and spread to the people who lived in both parishes. As we will see,this quarrel did not last long. It was surpassed in the early 1980s when theViana do Castelo diocese, set up in 1977, took over the leadership of the con-fraternity. But before we go on to this last chapter of the story, let us pausefor a moment and look at the dispute between the two parishes over theirrights to the cult.

Folk and priestly politics of local religion

Disputes of this kind are far from unusual. In fact, they configure a persis-tent tradition to be found in all epochs at many pilgrimage sites in Portugaland elsewhere. There are two immediate reasons for this. The first is the factthat romaria shrines and chapels are always a source of supra-local renownand also of income for the parishes that own them. The growth of a shrine’spopularity subsequently tends to arouse the envy of neighboring parishes.There is also another factor. Pilgrimage and romaria sites are usually built inremote unpopulated areas where land rights happen to be easily disputable.In these no-man’s lands, even if the boundary between parishes is set downin a written record, recognition of the rights depends on the identification ofcertain orographic features and other natural landmarks such as crags orsprings. Now, this identification is open to different interpretations anddoubts and confusion occur very often, intentionally or not. At times, thename under which some craggy rock was registered at a certain time is nolonger in use and is replaced by some other. At other times, the same name

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is used by different people for different boulders or crags. This can be genui-nely fortuitous, but then again it may be deliberate whenever it mightstrengthen a person’s or group’s claims over some piece of land.

I do not know the details of the disagreement between the Estorãosand the Arcos priests nor do I know which of the two was right, or even ifone or the other could have been right. As far as I was told, what started asa dispute between priests soon grew into a quarrel between parishes. Loca-lism can be defined as that sense of community grounded in the fact ofbelonging to a given place – be it a parish or any hamlet within it. Localismhas been a traditional and pervasive element in the politics of identity in theAlto Minho, and it grows especially visible when enacted in situations of in-ter-local rivalry, whether ritualized or not.13 Like all forms of identification,localism is mostly transmitted informally and is often dormant, but it can bestirred and awoken under certain circumstances – such as a quarrel betweenparish priests over control of a cult. This is what happened in Estorãos andArcos at the end of the 1970s.

And this now takes us back to the legend of the origin of the cult thatI heard in the summers of 1992 and 1996. As I mentioned earlier on, thepeople I spoke to had little to say as to the identity of the shepherdesses whohad purportedly found the image of the Virgin. The only thing they wouldsometimes say was that they came from the parish of São Pedro dos Arcos.In the 1950s, Chã Grande, the mountain plain where according to legend theimage was found, was used as a pasture for sheep and goats owned by peoplefrom the neighboring mountain parishes such as Estorãos, Arcos, Montaria,Arga de São João, Arga de Baixo and Arga de Cima.14 It is tempting to won-der why the legend, at least the versions I managed to collect, became so in-sistently fixated on shepherdesses from one of these parishes.

I am inclined to think that this is no accident and may be connectedwith the dispute between the Arcos and Estorãos parishes at the end of the1970s. Estorãos had obvious historical rights over the shrine, since everyoneknew (or at least could easily find out) that it was their priest who had it built.The Arcos claim, in turn, was based on alleged land rights: the shrine wasbuilt on parish territory. Perhaps the legend of the shepherdesses had been

13 For more on the salience of localism in the Alto Minho society, cf. Pina-Cabral (1986: 126-134). For an ethnographicaccount of some paradigmatic manifestations of inter-local rivalry in Serra de Arga, cf. Cerejeira (2003: 41-43 and71-75).14 Raising goats and sheep to sell was at that time an important source of revenue for people living in the Serra deArga villages. Some of them had large collective flocks that consisted of animals owned by various households andwere taken out to pasture on communal land (baldios) on a rotating basis of turns (vezeira). Each household had turnsin proportion to the number of animals they owned. From the 1940s onwards, State Forestry Services engaged in aforestation policy for communal lands that decreased the pastures substantially and made the work of keeping watchover the animals more difficult. Until then, goats spent most of the year on their own in the mountains in a semi-wildstate. For more on the local impact of forestation in Serra de Arga, cf. Cerejeira (2003: 55-57).

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invented within this scenario to strengthen the territorial claim with a (leg-endary) historical one. If the vox populi said that the image of Our Lady of theMinho had been discovered by some shepherdesses from Arcos, this gave theArcos parish another reason for it to administer the cult and reap any sub-sequent benefits.

The available evidence allows only conjecture and more research isneeded before a proper hypothesis can be presented. However, for the sakeof my conjecture, one could call to mind the fact that in many other places,disputes about rights over isolated shrines and chapels often have a legen-dary translation. In the Ponte de Lima borough not far from Estorãos, forinstance, there is the story that the Senhor da Saúde shrine was built (in theseventeenth century) after the discovery of a statue of Christ on the Cross thathad been forgotten and was by then hidden in the forest. The crucifix wasfound exactly on the dividing line between the parishes of Calvelo andFriastelas and this immediately set off a dispute between them about whoowned the image. The tale is told that to end the dispute, they took a coupleof oxen that had never been yoked before to the site and got them to pull acart with the stone crucifix in it. They decided that the rightful owner of theimage would be the parish the oxen walked to. The oxen took off in directionof Friastelas, but then stopped in a clearing halfway there and refused to con-tinue. So the chapel was built on that exact place and the cult came to beadministered by the Friastelas parish.15

So, it is neither impossible nor exceptional that the inhabitants of Arcosfell back on a legendary idiom, as had their Friastelas neighbors, to validatetheir rights. On the contrary, it would fit in completely with the customarypolitics of local religion.

Diocesan politics of folk religion

Let us now continue on firmer ground. In the early 1980s, as I said before, theleading posts in the Confraternity of Our Lady of the Minho were taken overby the recently-created bishopric of Viana. Father Alves no longer presidedover the brotherhood and was replaced by Monsignor Sebastião PiresFerreira, the Vicar General of the diocese. There were two consequences ofthis change and both were intentional. The first was to put an end to the dis-putes between the Estorãos and Arcos parishes, which seemed to go on for-ever. The second was to raise a place of cult whose founder had merelyaspired to making it a municipal pilgrimage site to the status of diocesanshrine. The bishopric of Viana was separated from the archbishopric of Braga

15 For more on this legend and cult, cf. Vasconcelos (1998a: 355-356).

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in 1977 at the end of nearly fifty years of continuous petitioning to the HolySee (in 1926, 1940, 1964, 1970 and 1976) and lobbying by clergymen from theAlto Minho who held posts at the Braga See together with young Minhoseminarists at the St Barnabas Seminary in the same city. A sector of the AltoMinho clergy felt they were subaltern to and even colonized by Braga, andthe movement for a Viana diocese took on a regionalist and anticolonialistdiscourse.16

The first steps to set up a diocese were taken at the same time as theAlto Minho was being defined as an area with a provincial identity. Althoughthe Viana district had existed since 1835, the designation “Alto Minho” onlybecame common in the 1920s.17 According to António Medeiros (2003: 48),the configuration of a provincial identity that coincided with the administra-tive district was begun at that time by intellectuals and politicians in Vianawithin the framework of regionalist demands. Aspirations for ecclesiasticautonomy began at the same time, but took a long time to achieve. This wasas much due to the pace of the Catholic bureaucratic machinery as the unwil-lingness of the Braga archdiocese to give up such an important part of theirterritory. The new diocese was eventually institutionalized by the Holy Seeon November 3rd 1977.

As soon as it was emancipated, the new bishopric got down to crea-ting its symbols and promoting a sense of identity among the Catholics in thearea. According to what I was told by the Vicar General of Viana, the diocese’spromotion of Our Lady of the Minho cult had from the start “both a spiritualand a sociological objective”.18 The spiritual objective was to intensifypeople’s devotion to the Virgin Mary. The sociological objective was to createa sense of community and fraternity among Alto Minho Catholics. This mightbe more accurately described as a political goal, since it has mostly to do withthe politics of ecclesiastic identity.

The idea of upgrading the cult of Our Lady of the Minho to a diocesanlevel intensified with D. Armindo Lopes Coelho, the second bishop of Viana

16 Father Carlindo Vieira (1996) provides important information about lobbying that went on to set up the Viana dio-cese between 1926 and 1977. His book is mainly about what was known as the Viana Colony (Colónia de Viana), anunofficial association created in 1931 by young seminarists studying in Braga but who came from the district of Viana.One of the Colony’s former leaders called it “a regionalist and spiritual movement set up for mutual support, enter-tainment and, at the same time, to petition for the diocese” (Father Artur Coutinho, quoted in Vieira 1996: 57). Thename of the group clearly expressed its autonomist intentions: “the Viana people were being colonised by Braga” (id.ibid.: 57). From the standpoint of the Colony members, it was a typical colonial situation: by their territorial controlover Viana, the Braga archdiocese “soaked up more profitable advantages than assumed responsibilities” (Vieira 1996:69). The Viana Colony was organised into an authentic proto-diocese, or if you will, a “shadow diocese” with a bishop(called the bishop of Viana), Vicar General, dean, canons and all the other positions proper to a chapter of a cathe-dral (cf. Vieira 1996: 79-81).17 The Viana district was created in the same way as the other Portuguese districts during the administrative reformof the Portuguese kingdom that ended the old comarcas and províncias.18 Comment made by Monsignor Sebastião Pires Ferreira in an interview in July 1996.

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(1982-1997) and several means were used to achieve this end.19 One wasbuilding a new shrine in Chã Grande, a large temple still under construction.Another is that starting in 1983, the bishop has nearly always presided overthe religious celebrations of the annual pilgrimages. Other regional dignita-ries in the civil service also attend, such as the district civil governor(governador civil), municipality presidents or their representatives, and theAlto Minho Region Tourism Board president, who recently gave a great boostto the cult’s publicity by putting a picture of Our Lady of the Minho on thecover of Alto Minho em Festa, a tourism guidebook published in 2002.

Finally, the most effective way to inculcate the new devotion inthe hearts of Alto Minho Catholics was an invented tradition. From 1983onwards, the annual pilgrimages have turned into convoys of cars andcoaches that leave from one of the boroughs of the Viana district every year.In the weeks before the pilgrimage, Our Lady of the Minho does the roundsof the parishes in that particular municipality and remains one or two daysin each parish church so that the people may see her and pray to her.

As we know the reasons behind the diocese’s commitment to theregionalization of this cult and the means used to achieve this, we may stillask ourselves what were the circumstances that led to this choice and invest-ment.20 And we may find several possible answers. First, Our Lady of theMinho was a recent cult site run by a confraternity where local clergy havepredominated from the start and was thus easier for the diocese to penetratethan other more established shrines with brotherhoods or festival committeesused to greater independence from the ecclesiastic machinery. Besides this,the dispute between the Arcos and Estorãos priests was an excellent pretextfor the higher powers to intervene. Another important factor for the choicewas the actual location of the shrine. The Serra de Arga is the meeting pointof five municipalities that form the western half of the diocese – Caminha,Paredes de Coura, Ponte de Lima, Viana do Castelo and Vila Nova de Cer-veira. As I have already noted, practically the whole of the Alto Minho canbe seen from the top of the sierra. Another factor to take into account are theexperiential and allegorical potentialities of the landscape. When pilgrims toOur Lady of the Minho are asked what brings them there, many speak of thequietness of the place and the beauty of the views. The diocesan clergy musthave had this in mind also, as we can see in Bishop D. Armindo Lopes

19 D. Armindo Lopes Coelho left the Viana diocese in 1997 and was appointed bishop of Oporto. The present bishopis D. José Augusto Fernandes Pereira, who was born in Valença do Minho. The first bishop of Viana was D. JúlioTavares Rebimbas.20 Making Our Lady of the Minho into a diocesan shrine was not a consensual decision for all Viana clergy. There werepriests who thought that the choice should have fallen on a more popular shrine such as the Sacred Heart of Jesus atthe Mount of Santa Luzia (in Viana do Castelo) or the old shrine of Our Lady of Peneda at Gavieira (near Arcos deValdevez).

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Coelho’s words during his homily at the 1983 pilgrimage: “in this atmosphereof untouched countryside, of purity and faith, of heights that invigorate andcheer us, as well as an atmosphere of faith that unites us, it seems as if thewords of Christ to His disciples echo here and now with special profundityand hope: ‘The Kingdom of God is come nigh unto you’” (1985: 3).

Finally, there is another factor that seems far weightier than all theothers. It is obviously the iconography and the name with which MonsignorMoreira das Neves baptized the Virgin of the Serra de Arga in the 1950s.Could there have been a more fitting image than that of Our Lady of theMinho dressed in a regional costume with which to pontificate in the shrineof the Viana diocese (see Fig. 2)? Hardly.

Fig. 2 – One of the most recent images of Our Lady of the Minho,as depicted on a contemporary devotional print.

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The lavradeira and provincial identity in Alto Minho

Hardly in the 1970s to be more exact. For in the early twentieth century, theclergy would probably have thought that dressing the image of Our Lady inthose clothes and displaying her thus to the faithful was a completely foolishor even blasphemous idea. According to Manuel Couto Viana, most priestsin the areas around Viana do Castelo censured their women parishioners whowore what was called the lavradeira’s costume on festive days. This flam-boyant costume, which seemed to give women’s busts and hips a life of theirown was “much too ‘eye-catching’ and thus incompatible with the sense ofdiscretion and modesty that women should conform to” (Viana 1990: 72-73).

But time changes everything. In 1973, an anecdotic but very enlighte-ning controversy arose in the church bulletin Serra e Vale – a publicationedited by the priests of five Serra de Arga parishes. In the July edition, oneof the local priests wrote an article in which he regretted that the girls in thesierra hamlets were abandoning their regional costume and had begun toattend local festivities in slacks and light summery dresses bought in town.In the following edition, a young woman born and bred in a sierra parish,Natalina Araújo, who was studying in Lisbon and regularly contributed tothe bulletin, criticized the priest for his ideas. She said that the traditionalwoolen skirt and waistcoat were hot, heavy and uncomfortable to wear andthat to impose them as the festive dress was a senseless anachronism. Thelocal priest replied in the September bulletin. Girls had not stopped wearingthe costume because it was ugly or uncomfortable. It was “because theythought it made them look like rustic and backward provincials.” For thepriest, what was at issue here was woman’s vanity, pure and simple, and “thewish to look important.” He added:

Natalina, if today you saw going by in downtown Rossio in Lisbon the doc-tor you once consulted or even that TV actress you so admire dressed ascountrywomen in traditional costume you would certainly say: How eccen-tric! They can’t be right in the head! Well, we could say the very same thingabout country girls who dress up as those haughty ladies. That’s why I saidthat everything has its place… […] Of course I agree with light summerydresses when worn by weighty heads and not an affront to decency and goodhabits. I also agree with slacks when they are worn with the right intentions.But is this the case?

It is obvious that between 1900 and 1970, the clergy’s preoccupation withthings being in their right place and about women’s modesty remained unal-tered. Both these concerns are undoubtedly salient features of clerical culture,but I will refrain from inquiring into the reasons here. The manner in whichpriests look upon the lavradeira’s costume, however, has changed dramati-

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cally: what in the 1900s was a provocative and indecent costume became inthe 1970s and in the words of the priest I just quoted, “the immaculate cos-tume of our grandmothers.” How had this happened?

The viewpoint did an about-turn mainly because of what was calledthe campaign for the revival of the Viana costume, begun in the 1920s by mem-bers of the intellectual elite in Viana do Castelo. At the head of the campaignwas Manuel Couto Viana, born into a wealthy industrial family. He was anillustrator, self-taught ethnographer and held important positions in NewState organizations aimed at folklorizing popular culture.21 Other membersof the local bourgeoisie and aristocracy, full of regionalist fervor, joined in thecampaign. They were also, in most cases, partisans of conservative socialpolitics and sympathizers of the monarchist cause.

These intellectuals were very familiar with a literary and pictorial tra-dition started in the last decades of the nineteenth century that had esta-blished a set of clichés about the Minho, a tradition put in motion by otherintellectuals who held a rather more central position in Portugal’s socio-political geography. António Medeiros (1995 and 2003) carried out a thoroughexamination of these embryonic discourses and imagery of Minho identityand showed, among other things, that very early on they had insistentlyfocused on the region’s country folk and most especially on the lavradeira.

The reasons behind the choice of the lavradeira as regional icon cer-tainly deserve further study.22 At this point I would venture to say that thesuccess of that female symbolization of the Minho must be due to a numberof factors. It may well be the result of a fortunate aesthetical agreementamong people from different social backgrounds with correspondingly dis-parate ideas and motivations. The emblematic lavradeira’s costume was a fes-tive attire, the costume lavradeiras wore on special occasions and celebrations.Strikingly colorful with its gold chains and jewelry, it probably matched manycountry folks’ images of beauty and wealth.

The fact that the Minho was personified as a woman may be the resultof various circumstances. In the first place, personification is a form of sym-bolization typical of both national and regional modern imageries (cf. Löfgren1989, Medeiros 1995: 99). Furthermore, we have already seen that in the ruralareas of Alto Minho the women held a central social position, something thatruns counter to the gender patterns typically described in anthropologi-cal literature on “Mediterranean societies.” Early in the twentieth century,Manuel Joaquim Gonçalves de Castro wrote the following about the inha-bitants of the Soajo hamlet:

21 For more on Manuel Couto Viana and his work at the Junta Central das Casas do Povo, cf. the biography written byhis son, António Manuel Couto Viana (in Viana 1990: 183-191), and also Reis (1993).22 Benjamin Pereira’s article on “cultural regionalism” (1989) is a notable landmark on this topic.

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The women do the agricultural work including sowing the fields that they soskillfully plough. Men from the age of 17 to 40 earn money during the eightmonths of autumn, winter and part of spring as bakers and orange sellers inLisbon or the Alentejo. During the four months they spend in their home vil-lage, they pass their time playing the stick game and going to fairs andromarias (Castro 1907:65).

Many years later, João de Pina-Cabral wrote that “numerous authors havereferred to the ‘matripotestality’ or ‘matriarchy’ of Minho” (1986: 86). Dra-wing on fieldwork he conducted in two parishes in the region in around 1980,he added that “while we may disagree with their formulations, evidence doessuggest that, in rural Minho, the position of women is different from that inother regions of the country” (1986: 86). The pre-eminence of women in theMinho peasant society is thus a widely acknowledged fact, even if the theo-ries advanced to explain them differ. In the lavradores social group in parti-cular, it was the farmwives who ensured that the household carried on pro-perly. Until the 1960s, it was mostly women who remained on the land whilethe men came and went. For this reason, many intellectuals who nurturedsocial projects of a conservative nature (which, as previously pointed out, wasthe majority of intellectuals who formed the Minhoto regionalist elite)regarded the Minho woman as the bulwark of tradition and autochthony,values that were in some of their eyes being threatened by foreign waysintroduced by the men folk. The comments of Conde de Aurora describingthe Ponte de Lima fair at the end of the 1920s illustrate this view:

Carts, baskets, sacks, bundles – all the weight, all the work is for the Womanto do. The lads go about with sweet basil behind their ears and hackberrystick in hand, usually holding a black umbrella, when not wearing a townstraw hat or a panama of someone who has been to Brazil, or then a manlykhaki shirt and leggings from American stores in France. […] That Portuguesemen, that Minhoto men, should be like this! If they emigrated to England,they would return wearing a dinner jacket and play golf on the terraces alongour river banks. What saves us is the heroic, traditional and lovely Minhowoman. God bless you, Woman! (Aurora 1929: 176)

Leaving aside the reasons that led to the regionalization of the lavradeira icon,it is worth noting that according to Medeiros, the same kind of synecdochicprocess that made the lavradeira the symbol of the Minho likewise made theMinho the symbol of Portugal. Around 1900, “of the several provinces, onlythe Minho emerges as understood as a whole […] as a national landscape”(1995: 98). And, as Medeiros also argues in his contribution to this volume,even today, a century later, the lavradeira keeps having “important allegori-cal uses as a symbol of the Portuguese nation as a whole (Medeiros, page 71in this volume).” These uses are noticeable not only within Portugal, but also

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among Portuguese emigrants throughout the world, as both Andrea Klimtand Kimberly Holton refer to in their articles published in this volume.

Let us go back now to the beginning of the last century. Writing in the1920s, the Viana do Castelo ethnographer, Cláudio Basto, showed how thelavradeira stereotype had been vulgarized by that time among tourists andtravelers from other parts of the country:

There are people who having traveled through the Minho are astonishednever to have come across the famous “Minho” costume. Deceived by the“Minho” denomination, deceived by photographs in magazines and post-cards that nonsensically show village women richly attired in Viana costumebusy at their domestic or agricultural tasks, these people expect to clap eyesat every corner […] on impeccable young girls in that famous costume! Purefantasy! (1930: 44)23

According to Cláudio Basto, nowhere in the Minho in the early 1920s wasthere “just one typical regional costume for women, or anyone else,” noteven in the Viana municipality. What postcards showed as the Viana orlavradeira’s costume was “a woman’s festive attire, a ‘gala’ dress only usedon special occasions and by young girls from some villages in the boroughof Viana do Castelo” (1930: 7-8, author’s italics). Moreover, he added, thecostume had changed with time and the “full de rigueur costume was noth-ing but a certain phase in its evolution” (1930: 39, author’s italics). What iscurious is that this same ethnographer who exposed in so critical a mannerthe discrepancy between objectified and living folk culture in the AltoMinho was also one of the people who battled against it. According to him,if the lavradeira’s costume were allowed to evolve naturally, it would endup being no longer worn at all. And this was something Cláudio Basto didnot want. So he encouraged town people (“who so influence village peopleand their ways”) to “show the costume all the admiration and esteem it sodeserves” so that “the nice and clever girls” of the region should learn to“maintain with love the most elegant and beautiful costumes of the Minho– and of Portugal” (1930: 54).

This was exactly what Manuel Couto Viana began to do with hiscampaign for the revival of the Viana costume. Among the reasons thatthe lavradeiras were ceasing to wear their festive flamboyant dress was thefact that bourgeois ladies in Viana were beginning to wear it as a fancy

23 Although the book Traje à Vianesa, from which I took this passage and the following ones, was published in 1930,the author informs that the essay “was first sketched in 1923 and a short extract came out of it […] entitled Do Traje àVianesa em Geral e do Traje de Afife em Especial: Notas Regionais” (Basto 1930: 54, n. 1). This first opuscle was publishedin 1925.

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dress. Consequently, one of the things that Couto Viana succeeded indoing was “that the authorities forbade women wearing the Viana costumefrom going to Carnival balls, as a way of dignifying the regional costume”(Viana 1990: 76). But this was just one of the policies that were put intoaction.

The campaign was staged mainly in the romaria of Our Lady ofAgonia, which is held every year in mid-August in the city of Viana. Celebra-tions that began in the second half of the eighteenth century as the local fish-ing community’s religious festivities had slowly grown and attracted othersocial groups in Viana and many country people from the surrounding areas.In the 1920s, the Viana elite took over the romaria and turned it into what theConde de Aurora called “our National Festivity of the Minho” (1929: 185).Manuel Couto Viana drew the posters for the romaria, always using “thelavradeira in her charming attire” (Viana 1990: 75) as the main motif. A cos-tume competition was also set up which has now become the CostumeFestival. Then in 1933, an ethnographic parade (cortejo etnográfico) was orga-nized, which at first exhibited the traditional costumes and folkways of theViana parishes but now includes all the district boroughs. The romaria ofAgonia has thus become the most spectacular display of the Alto Minho pro-vincial identity.24

The campaign for the revival of the Viana costume was very effectiveand had long-lasting results. The costume in its many variations started to beworn everywhere in the Alto Minho, and not only by folkloric groups(ranchos) that proliferated from the 1930s on, but also as ceremonial dress innon-folkloristic events. In the Serra de Arga hamlets, for instance, this cloth-ing did not exist in the early twentieth century. But nowadays there are notmany girls who do not have a regional costume, even those born in Lisbonbut whose parents continue to spend their summer holidays in the sierra (seeFig. 3). They wear it at certain local festivities and when they go to the SãoJoão romaria. So thanks to the revival campaign, the Viana costume has beensuccessfully and authentically provincialized. This is why in the mid-1950sMonsignor Moreira das Neves was in a position to consider it the mostfitting apparel for Our Lady of the Minho. And this is also why twenty-fiveyears later, the hierarchy at the Viana bishopric thought it proper to promotea chapel that sheltered a hybrid made up of a Virgin Mary and the Minhotafolk symbol into a diocesan shrine.

24 For more on the campaign for the revival of the Viana costume, see Manuel Couto Viana’s “Quando e como ressurgiunas lavradeiras de algumas freguesias do concelho de Viana o gosto pelo uso do seu lindo trajo de festa.” This textwas written in 1940, first published in Melo (1941: 46-55), and later republished with minor changes in Viana (1990:71-79). Cf. also Martins & Gonçalves (2000) for a comprehensive historical account of the romaria of Agonia, and Silva(1994) for a rich sociological portrait of the festivities in the 1990s.

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Conclusion

Let me now conclude. In the bishop of Viana’s homily at the first pilgrimagehe presided over at Chã Grande on July 3rd 1983, he spoke to the people therein the following manner:

As the Universal Mother, Our Lady does not belong exclusively to any onepeople or any one region. If you wished to attire her in the costume of thegirls and women of the Minho and call her Our Lady of the Conception ofthe Minho, it was not meant to lessen her universality or to diminish her rolebefore the Son, who died for all. Rather it was a way for you to draw closeto her, to approach her with a daring and humble plea, to receive her at homeand in your families, to open your souls and hearts to her, to have the sen-sation that you can hear her and thus speak to her (Coelho 1985: 8).

Now we know that it was not the audience listening to the bishop thatwanted the Virgin to be dressed as a Minho woman, nor did they name herOur Lady of the Conception of the Minho. We know that it was one of thehighest dignitaries in the Portuguese Catholic Church of the time who hasdone it. Was the bishop unaware of this? I did not ask him, but I would bet

Fig. 3 – Young women from the Serra de Arga wearing Viana costumes carry a saint standin a procession during their hamlet annual festival. (Photo by J. Vasconcelos, 1992).

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he was not. I think that D. Armindo’s words reveal very candidly what isa persistent disposition in the ecclesiastic politics of folk religion – that ofhaving double standards.

In their relationship with religious manifestations of the massesfocused on the cult of the Virgin and the saints, the clergy typically adopt atone and the same time an attitude of active promotion and patronizing dis-tancing. By means of encouraging what it calls “popular” or “folk religion,”the Roman Catholic Church acknowledges devotional traditions that would,through informal and familiar ways, reproduce themselves in any case to acertain extent independently of the Church’s teaching. On the other hand, bymaintaining a certain distance from this same “folk religion” (as when a priestdecides to dress a Virgin in peasant clothes and years later a bishop comesalong and suggests that it was the folk, the peasants, who did it) the Churchis approaching the elite’s secularized “world of the critique” (cf. Latour 2002and Claverie 1990), whose recognition is also important for the sake of theChurch’s social prestige. In that sober and serious world, proper religiousnessshould be an inner religiousness, a matter of consciousness.25

To summarize a great part of my argument, I would say that there isreally something we could tentatively call a religious folk culture – a num-ber of conventions socially transmitted that are called up when an inventionoccurs. The establishment of a chapel and an image on the top of a mountainis an invention that follows such cultural conventions. And the people res-pond to it by carrying with them to the heights of Chã Grande many custo-mary habits – their ways of paying promises and praying, their transistorsand concertinas, their five-liter flagons of wine and picnic baskets. They evenre-enact a century-old legendary tradition of inventio. At the same time, thisre-enactment of folk conventions is not entirely opposed to or even totallyindependent of priestly regulation. On the contrary, there is, as there alwayshas been, an ecclesiastic politics of promoting folk religion.

I have also sought in this article to demonstrate how the initiativestaken by successive ecclesiastic promoters of Our Lady of the Minho cult werethemselves deeply embedded in a number of cultural traditions and politi-cal trends. I focused on The Church’s revitalization of the Marian cult thatbegan in the second half of the nineteenth century, the regionalist movementthat turned the lavradeira into the personification of the Alto Minho, the policyto de-paganize the romarias that reached its peak around 1950, and finally thesetting up of the Viana diocese.

25 As François-André Isambert (1982) reminds us, even the expression “folk” or “popular religion,” which began tobe used in the Catholic Pastoral vocabulary before it started being used in the social sciences, is a result and a sym-ptom of the duplicity I am talking about. The noun “religion” keeps a large number of Catholics within the legiti-mate field of religion, while the adjective “folk” or “popular” disqualifies them in that same field, thus saving theface of the Church that turns to secularized minds – be they also religious or not.

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By means of framing the origin and development of the cult of OurLady of the Minho within all these cultural settings and political trends,I tried to understand not only how the merging of an image of the VirginMary with the paramount icon of Alto Minho folk culture became possible,but also how it has been open to different modes of appropriation andmeaning.

As a final remark, I should add that ecclesiastic dignitaries have beenprone to exaggerated expectations regarding this cult. Ten years after the firstpilgrimage presided by D. Armindo Lopes Coelho, the theologian José daSilva Lima published his PhD thesis on the contemporary reality of Catholi-cism in the Alto Minho. There he refers to Our Lady of the Minho as “an iconin project whose material and ideological foundations are already there”(1994: 46). Echoing the bishop of Viana, he adds that “this unification of thecult in an important place of the diocese, made through the elaboration of acollective symbolism, ‘will progressively shift the sites of external pilgrimage[i.e. the sites of romaria] to a secondary position’ and will lead to a ‘histori-cal testimony’ of the faith of the Minhotos” (1994: 46).

Despite the bishop’s and José da Silva Lima’s hopefulness, another tenyears have passed and Our Lady of the Minho continues “an icon in project.”The investment made by the ecclesiastic authorities in upgrading the newpilgrimage center has not as yet led to a significant increase in people com-ing to the shrine, a number currently at between two and three thousand onpilgrimage days. So, if there was to be a moral of some kind to this story, itcould well be that it takes more than a provincial costume to make a provin-cial cult. At least, it also takes time.

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de Caso”, Etnográfica, 1 (2), 237-257.AURORA, Conde de, 1929, Roteiro da Ribeira Lima, Ponte de Lima, Author’s Edition.BASTO, Cláudio, 1930, Traje à Vianesa, Gaia, Edições Apolino.BRITO, Joaquim Pais de, 1982, “O Estado Novo e a Aldeia Mais Portuguesa de Portugal”, O Fascismo em

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TRAJE E COSTUME NUM SANTUÁRIOMARIANO DO NOROESTE PORTUGUÊS DOSANOS 1950

Este artigo analisa a genealogia e os usos de um itemparticular da “cultura popular”: Nossa Senhora doMinho. Trata-se de uma imagem de Maria concebidano final dos anos 1950 que combina elementosiconográficos típicos da Virgem e da lavradeira, osímbolo regional do Alto Minho. Procuro situar ahistória desta imagem e do seu culto no cruzamentode (1) uma cultura religiosa popular local, (2) ummovimento regionalista minhoto particularmenteactivo a partir dos anos 1920, e (3) orientaçõesculturais e políticas eclesiásticas operando aos níveisinternacional, nacional, diocesano e paroquial.Através destes enquadramentos, pretendocompreender não só como foi possível fundir asimagens da Virgem e da lavradeira numa só, mastambém como o resultado dessa fusão se tem prestadoa diferentes tipos de apropriação e significação.

João Vasconcelos

Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbonjoao.vasconcelos@ics.ul.pt